CONCERN OVER HEAD INJURIES FOR OVER 100 YEARS

12.27.12

In 1905, the violence of college football roused so much public concern that President Theodore Roosevelt, who had previously intervened to bring about settlements in a national coal strike and the Russo-Japanese War, decided to wield his big stick on college football. He summoned to Washington representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which then fielded some of the best teams in the nation.
Roosevelt was responding to long-festering anger over the violence of college football, as John Miller makes clear in his book, The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football.
Roosevelt extracted a pledge from the Harvard, Yale and Princeton representatives “to carry out in letter and in spirit the rules of the game” – but most of all, the president provided a setting that made it possible to begin genuine reform of the game.